Controlling and processing of time-variant problem is universal in the fields of engineering and science, and the discrete-time recurrent neural network (RNN) model has been proven as an effective method for handling a variety of discrete time-variant problems. However, such model usually originates from the discretization research of continuous time-variant problem, and there is little research on the direct discretization method. To address the aforementioned problem, this article introduces a novel discrete-time RNN model for solving the discrete time-variant problem in a pioneering manner. Specifically, a discrete time-variant nonlinear system, which originates from the mathematical modeling of serial robot manipulator, is presented as a target problem. For solving the problem, first, the technique of second-order Taylor expansion is used to deal with the discrete time-variant nonlinear system, and the novel discrete-time RNN model is proposed subsequently. Second, the theoretical analyses are investigated and developed, which shows the convergence and precision of the proposed discrete-time RNN model. Furthermore, three distinct numerical experiments verify the excellent performance of the proposed discrete-time RNN model. In addition, a robot manipulator example further verifies the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed novel discrete-time RNN model.

In the short text, the extremely short length, feature sparsity, and high ambiguity pose huge challenges to classification tasks. Recently, as an effective method for tuning Pre-trained Language Models for specific downstream tasks, prompt-learning has attracted a vast amount of attention and research. The main intuition behind the prompt-learning is to insert the template into the input and convert the tasks into equivalent cloze-style tasks. However, most prompt-learning methods only consider the class name and monotonous strategy for knowledge incorporating in cloze-style prediction, which will inevitably incur omissions and bias in short text classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a short text classification method with prompt-learning. Specifically, the top $M$ concepts related to the entity in the short text are retrieved from the open Knowledge Graph like Probase, these concepts are first selected by the distance with class labels, which takes both the short text itself and the class name into consideration during expanding label word space. Then, we conducted four additional strategies for the integration of the expanded concepts, and the union of these concepts are adopted finally in the verbalizer of prompt-learning. Experimental results show that the obvious improvement is obtained compared with other state-of-the-art methods on five well-known datasets.

Leaf area index (LAI) is one of the indicators measuring the growth of rice in the field. LAI monitoring plays an important role in ensuring the stable increase of grain yield. In this study, the canopy reflectance spectrum of rice was obtained by ASD at the elongation, booting, heading and post-flowering stages of rice, and the correlations between the original reflectance (OR), first-derivative transformation (FD), reciprocal transformation (1/R), and logarithmic transformation (LOG) with LAI were analyzed. Characteristic bands of spectral data were then selected based on the successive projections algorithm (SPA) and Pearson correlation. Moreover, ridge regression (RR), partial least squares (PLS), and multivariate stepwise regression (MSR) were conducted to establish estimation models based on characteristic bands and vegetation indices. The research results showed that the correlation between canopy spectrum and LAI was significantly improved after FD transformation. Modeling using SPA to select FD characteristic bands performed better than using Pearson correlation. The optimal modeling combination was FD-SPA-VI-RR, with the coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.807 and the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.794 for the training set, R² of 0.878 and RMSE of 0.773 for the validation set 1, and R² of 0.705 and RMSE of 1.026 for the validation set 2. The results indicated that the present model may predict the rice LAI accurately, meeting the requirements of large-scale statistical monitoring of rice growth indicators in the field.

Detection of the Fusarium head blight (FHB) is crucial for wheat yield protection, with precise and rapid FHB detection increasing wheat yield and protecting the agricultural ecological environment. FHB detection tasks in agricultural production are currently handled by cloud servers and utilize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Hence, this paper proposed a lightweight model for wheat ear FHB detection based on UAV-enabled edge computing, aiming to achieve the purpose of intelligent prevention and control of agricultural disease. Our model utilized the You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) and MobileNet deep learning architectures and was applicable in edge devices, balancing accuracy, and FHB detection in real-time. Specifically, the backbone network Cross Stage Partial Darknet53 (CSPDarknet53) of YOLOv4 was replaced by a lightweight network, significantly decreasing the network parameters and the computing complexity. Additionally, we employed the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU) and Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to regress the loss function to guarantee the detection accuracy of FHB. Furthermore, the loss function incorporated the focal loss to reduce the error caused by the unbalanced positive and negative sample distribution. Finally, mixed-up and transfer learning schemes enhanced the model’s generalization ability. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model performed admirably well in detecting FHB of the wheat ear, with an accuracy of 93.69%, and it was somewhat better than the MobileNetv2-YOLOv4 model (F1 by 4%, AP by 3.5%, Recall by 4.1%, and Precision by 1.6%). Meanwhile, the suggested model was scaled down to a fifth of the size of the state-of-the-art object detection models. Overall, the proposed model could be deployed on UAVs so that wheat ear FHB detection results could be sent back to the end-users to intelligently decide in time, promoting the intelligent control of agricultural disease.

Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based vulnerability detection systems have achieved remarkable success. However, the lack of explainability poses a critical challenge to deploy black-box models in security-related domains. For this reason, several approaches have been proposed to explain the decision logic of the detection model by providing a set of crucial statements positively contributing to its predictions. Unfortunately, due to the weakly-robust detection models and suboptimal explanation strategy, they have the danger of revealing spurious correlations and redundancy issue. In this paper, we propose Coca, a general framework aiming to 1) enhance the robustness of existing GNN-based vulnerability detection models to avoid spurious explanations; and 2) provide both concise and effective explanations to reason about the detected vulnerabilities. Coca consists of two core parts referred to as Trainer and Explainer. The former aims to train a detection model which is robust to random perturbation based on combinatorial contrastive learning, while the latter builds an explainer to derive crucial code statements that are most decisive to the detected vulnerability via dual-view causal inference as explanations. We apply Coca over three typical GNN-based vulnerability detectors. Experimental results show that Coca can effectively mitigate the spurious correlation issue, and provide more useful high-quality explanations.